This food-based performance explores the body as a site of transformation—shaped by elements, rituals, and acts of nourishment. Drawing inspiration from Ayurvedic principles, communal cooking, and sculptural processes, the piece invites participants into an intimate exchange: sculpting, feeding of and feeding for, and labor for each other as gesture of care that extends beyond the conventional forms of dining. Through sensory engagement and collective participation, the performance examines the unseen imprints we leave on one another—through touch, through sustenance, through ritual in the process of making.

Food becomes extensions of the body, molded into ephemeral forms that are baked, macerated, dissolved, vapored or crumbled into ash. A shared meal becomes a ritual of dissolution—what is left behind, and what is absorbed? How does food shape not only the body but the memory it carries?

In the setting of an old sculpture atelier, this food-based performance unfolds through a series of sensory encounters. Each station invites participants to engage with a different way of transforming ingredients—through touch, heat, fermentation, dissolution, or air. Cooking becomes a gesture of balance, shaping flavors as much as the body itself.

Participants move through acts of preparation, tasting, and feeding, discovering how textures shift, flavors deepen, and matter dissolves. The performance is both intimate and collective—a space where nourishment is not only consumed but also exchanged, where food becomes a medium for connection, memory, and transformation.

This event will also include a short audiovisual essay called The Deep Wings (by Suraia Abud) and created thanks to the artistic residency carried out in Komařice REZI.DANCE in automn 2024 with artists Asli Hatipoğlu & Heidi Hornáčková. It is a creative proposal that invites the viewer on an emotional journey through the landscape, food, and experiences lived during the automn in this village.

How are emotional bonds built across food, territory, and people? Is it,  perhaps, a relationship that nurtures us?

The event will take place in English.

Credits

Concept: Aslı Hatipoğlu (TR/TH), Heidi Hornáčková (CZ) and Suraia Abud (LB/UY)

On site, performing and cooking: Aslı Hatipoğlu, Heidi Hornáčková

Video essay: Suraia Abud

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Heidi Hornáčková is an artist, performer, cook/baker and curator currently working in the Czech Republic and internationally. Her projects, in which food acts as the mediator of a shared moment, are rooted in contemporary visual art and experimental theater. She understands the process of food sharing as a unique mutual experience in time and space that allows for expanded opportunities for exploring perception and collective memory, using the playful, communal and transcendent potential of food to encourage neo-traditional ways of interpersonal and interspecies encounter.

Asli Hatipoğlu’s interdisciplinary social practice focuses on curating participatory dinners and installations that shed light on how culinary history and agricultural politics are changing our relationship to food. From working with micro-scale bacteria and yeasts to insects such as the domesticated silkworm, Hatipoğlu critically investigates ways of relating to our environment and ourselves. She researches production supply chains through performative acts to shed light to how humans influence other living organisms. After working several years as a self-taught chef, Asli deepened her knowledge of fermentation during her residency at the Food Lab Jan van Eyck Academie 2020-2021, along with participating in festivals such as Food Art Film Festival JVE (NL), Taking Root–Food Art Film Festival CCA Glasgow (UK), Foodculture Days Vevey (CH), Oerol Festival Terschelling (NL), Japanese Knotweed Festival at Mediamatic (NL) and Zamus Theaterhaus Cologne (DE). Her works have been exhibited and performed in places such as Zuiderzee Museum Enkhuizen, Radius CCA Delft, Fanfare Amsterdam, Perdu Amsterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht, Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimünster Germany, Hectolitre Art space Brussels and A.pass Brussels.

Suraia Abud Coaik is a Uruguayan-Lebanese researcher, interdisciplinary artist, and chef who lives between Madrid, Montevideo, and Beirut. With a background in Culinary Arts and gastronomy, she later pursued Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her work explores food as a social and cultural phenomenon, blending research with artistic expression through performances, installations, documentaries, and relational art. She has participated in various artistic residencies worldwide, including in Spain, Lebanon, France, Mexico, Nigeria, Italy, Scotland, and the Czech Republic. Her projects often focus on migration, memory, and culinary traditions, creating interdisciplinary narratives that connect history, identity, and contemporary culture, bio art and fermentation. She published her first book Mezze Errante in 2022, a book of food anthropology and connections between Lebanon and its diaspora through culinary knowledge and food memories